No More COD4 I Promise

2 January, 2008. 757 words.

I made Commander (rank 55) in Call of Duty 4 and it unlocked a gold Desert Eagle gun. Big whoop. Now what? Well, the obvious answer is a big fat “nothing” unless I want to move into match play. For that I’d have to “tryout” for a clan, and in all this time I’ve been playing on pub servers and watching clans recruiting, I haven’t seen any clans that I’d want to be associated with. Who would want to join a clan that recruits from pub servers anyway? :)

So I suspect my time in Call of Duty 4 is coming to an end, and I’ll need to find another game. Surprisingly enough, there are several options to pick from. Gears of War, Crysis, Bioshock, and Mass Effect are all recent titles I haven’t played yet. Though I will probably need to upgrade my computer before thinking about another game. I had to turn almost all the cool graphic settings off in COD4 to play at 60 fps.

But before I put the game away, I wanted to write down a couple of pub strategies in case anyone cared. Also because I’m bored.

For the record I settled on the M4 Assault Carbine with Red Dot sight as my weapon of choice. I think it’s one of the best all-around guns, good for just about any occasion. (The only reason I didn’t stick with the M16 is that sometimes it helps being able to fire more than 3 shots in a burst.) I used the Bandolier, Stopping Power, and Deep Impact perks. For Hardcore games and Free-for-all, I used the Bandolier, UAV Jammer, and Dead Silence perks, along with a silencer on the rifle.

Through trial and error and observation, I’ve found that the same basic strategy works for all Team Deathmatch games: Get behind the enemy team. That’s pretty much it. Standing on the front lines and slugging it out is not a very effective way to win, no matter how many people you put there. If I were designing a TDM match strategy, I would put roughly half the team on the front line to engage and hold the enemy team and the other half on flanking manuevers. Maybe add one or two other people roaming freely for support wherever needed.

The above flanking strategy works particularly well on the Crossfire map (shown above). It’s one of my favorite maps, though I’m not precisely sure why. Maybe just because I know it pretty well. The map is basically a long, dusty street in some desert town. The pub teams almost always congregate at either end of the street and try to snipe each other to death from the buildings. So what you want to do is navigate through the buildings and alleys down to the other end of the street, get behind the other team, who will usually be bunched up and focused entirely on shooting people a mile away, and mow them down. Eventually someone will get wise to your strategy, though, so it doesn’t work for very long. Also, if there are any smart players on the other team, they will be trying to do the same thing, so you’ll often meet them in the middle. Oh, also — make sure you sprint if you need to cross the street for any reason, and don’t stop, or you’ll be dead in seconds.

The same strategy also works on Downpour and Overgrown. Or any map where there’s a middleground where the two teams naturally meet and battle, and there is also a less-obvious “back door” path to the other side of the map. (However, it’s not as effective on Crash because snipers usually cover the back route, which is more-or-less a straight-line shot.)

Furthermore, I can’t leave COD4 without one brief comment on the “Hardcore” game mode: I can deal with and even enjoy the lack of UAV and crosshair, but um, dear God, the weapons do even more damage?? In Hardcore mode a single bullet in the chest from almost any gun will drop you instantly. You might think you’d need to be really, really good to play Hardcore, but I tend to think the opposite: It doesn’t take a great deal of skill when it’s all instant point-and-click kills. The only real trick is finding ways to get the drop on your opponents.

All in all, I’ve had a lot of fun with COD4 multiplayer. I got my $49 worth out of it I suppose, despite the ridiculously short single player campaign.

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